Ever Homewards

I forgot my ever-home: heaven, better than all the best bits of nostalgia and remembrance and hope and longing. That the soul is on pilgrimage through a sometimes dark and dangerous land; sometimes with friends & companions, other times alone, with thoughts and God and the holy angels.

We are all on the same pilgrimage, towards or away from home, or just sitting in the ditch. It is easy to seek our own way; to mistake our wishes or desires for reality; to set up shop or head the wrong way, swimming in excuses and likeminded company. Such is the broad and easy way of illusion, or as the philosopher put it, to be born dreaming and die dreaming without ever having woken up.

I forgot.

In Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, when the character Dante wakes up in the dark wood, it is not that he wasn’t there before, but that he was spiritually, intellectually, and sinfully in denial of the doomed state of his soul, and the dangers all around, and that the right road homewards– through all our days, many or few, to heaven– was “wholly lost and gone”. He forgot.

There were other things I forgot, entangled in illness and isolation– like the hope of resurrection; that the grave is a doorway, not an oblivion; that God will not suffer his holy ones to see corruption; that though in the midst of life we are in death.. yet death hasn’t the last word.

I’m sorry, because the whole Binky Free Canuckistan thing is part of my calling to serve others, through, despite, and given the opportunity of illness. It’s a God thing. I let the blog drop, got into a bucket of “Why Me?”, and let weariness and a desire for a false peace overcome me.

As in every age and place, we are at war– with ourselves, with powers & principalities and horrible ideas and false faith and good intentions turned into hell.

There’s just no sitting this one out. ~

Books Galore & More

~ I’VE STILL BEEN bookworming it– jonseing on Brit various tomes by historian Alison Weir; laughing out loud and enjoying the rich brain-squeezy goodness of Dorothy Dunnett’s Lymond Crawford novels; the Anglo-Catholic wisdom of H. F. M. Prescott in The Man on A Donkey; Ackroyd’s biography of Shakespeare; various other odds and ends along the way.

Via the Beeb & Tube of You, The Binks has been taking in The Hollow Crown (4 royal plays starting with Richard 2.0)– powerful, only slightly butchered, and wonderfully staged with a collection of faces new & old from the UK Shakespeariati crew.

Also saw the Globe DVD version of Henry 4.0 parts 1 & 2; a little over-acted in parts, but a great ensemble crew. Tried to watch & enjoy Ralph Fiennes’ Coriolanus (co-starring Gerard Butler), but great hunks of the text were missing (as in the pretty but patchwork Ian McKellen Richard III of 1995).

Read, Watch, Talk

It hardly does to talk about the riches of our cultural heritage, the importance of good literature and drama and all the rest, simply by paying lipservice to it. If we can follow the plot of Lost, or keep up with the twists and turns of tabloid romance, or learn the lyrics of countless pop-songs, then we can make room for the Bible, Greek and Roman legends, Medieval culture and music and literature, Shakespeare, and all the rest.

We must remember what we have forgotten, neglected, or had stolen away from us. These arou our words and thoughts, our stories, our joy and wisdom and warnings, our philosophy and theology, our history and art and understanding.

It is the radicals and progressives and Islamo-fanatics who would erase the past, consigning it to the infamous “ashheap of history”, a dead and buried past past. These things make us who we are– not just who we were– and who we can and shall be again. ~

Neener– Binks Told You So #941

~ SO THEN THE hellstorm of Hurricane Sandy hits and sludges the East Coast.. do the preppers and survival-types look quite so silly, hyper-cautious, and half-baked now?

Binks has written before, following on the thoughts of the Instapundit, about the fragility of our supply-systems, bringing us “Just In Time” most of our food, water, prescriptions– all of it. In our local area, one home-owner was forced to shut down his well and go on the water system, even though that well tapped a spring that has given hyper-fresh water for thousands of years.

Witness post-storm New York City– minus power, water, subway, trucked-in food & supplies– where’s your “Just In Time” shipping theory now? A supermarket with a warehouse– as in past decades– would mean food for several thousands for weeks. Now, what you see on the shelves is what you get. No back-up, no depth.. in one sense, no notion that there’s not always power and trucks and safe roads and staff able to get to work and unload the trucks.

Waaaah! Mommy!

It’s the modern disease– govtitty. Someone Else Will Look After It. If I choose not to be ready for storms, blackouts, floods, man-made disasters, somehow it’s not your fault or responsibility.

It’s been 50 or 60 years of bloated all-pervasive government, eating away at liberty, social and personal responsibility, charity to others, individual & group motivations to do the right thing, fight for and build the future, and hand on to others the hard-won gifts we have received from our forefathers, in better condition than we got them.

Most of the time, we can get away with this craziness, because the machine keeps working. We don’t see the general chaos ahead, because it’s kinda holding together just now, if we ignore the details and the evidence.

No, being prepared isn’t a free ticket to apocalypse land, bunker-living, or any of the rest of the sub-culture. As with any probem, some folks take things super-far. Learn what they may know, without following them down the End Of The World path.

Quit Stalling

Get ready. Now. Just do it, because you care for yourself, your family & neighbours, for being around to hand on civilization and live ordinary life, and enjoy the many blessings of God, and not needlessly suffer & die for the want of a few days of work and a few hundred dollars.

The links above are just a few useful sites to begin for disaster preparedness. Plan for 2 weeks or more; make sure you have lotsa water & food; basic tools, a good multitool, a good hatchet, a sawback machete, LED lights, several means of making fire, some means of cooking & heating, lots of backup meds, dogfood.. you know what to do. ~

~ AS THE CURRENT POTUS melts in public, revealing the non-entity and busy minions behind the curtains, it’s sad to see that– if polls can be believed– that so many voters are still willing to pull the lever for the see-through President, versus the tried & tested Romney.

Obama offered enchanting hot air: feel-good, make-believe, and lots of evil & nasty behind the curtain. No real answers or plans, just Hopenchange and spin, smoke and mirrors. As apostate liberal David Mamet details in his take-no-prisoners book The Secret Knowledge, it is a battle between fact-light feeling and wishes, versus evidence, facts, and the tried & tested wisdom of our civilization.

And the naive & happy True Believers are on a veritable crusade, to perfect the world, come hell or high water or necessary deaths. Their opponents are not just people honestly upholding their reasonable positions, they are bad. It’s why The Big O himself demonizes and viciously attacks his opponents– he’s an elected god, therefore his enemies are obviously devils.

Pessimistically Yours

“Leftwing people find it very hard to get on with rightwing people, because they believe that they are evil. Whereas I have no problem getting on with leftwing people, because I simply believe that they are mistaken.”

Frankly, I don’t care if Romney is just another politician– voters in the united States are electing a President, not a deity or messiah. Yes, U.S. politics is religion is politics, but let’s hope the past 4 years have awakened enough voters to reality, and away from the politics of perfection, let alone the politicization, division, proto-racewar and Muslim Brotherhood money and scheming behind the sockpuppet Obama.

The polls are still horribly skewed– if the truth behind them is what I suspect it is, Romeny is a shoe-in. But that may not be the end of this fight, in the short or long-term. November 4th may be a D-Day.. but the war was very much up for grabs for months and months after the allied invasion of Normandy.